Charlie Isn't Sure What to Think
by Fourteen Hundred Hours
Summary: Charlies view on Bella leaving home and getting married and the possibility of vampires etc.


**Charlie's view on Bella leaving home, getting married, etc. I know Charlie is a man of few words, but I just kinda ended up writing this anyway. Hope it's alright. **

My life has been pretty weird recently. My daughter came to live with me then moved out seemingly as fast as she moved in. She finished high school and got married, then seemed to vanish from my life completely.

Okay okay, don't get me wrong; I'm happy for my daughter. I mean, she's in love, she's happy, and I guess that makes me happy too. But I can't help thinking there's something weird about the whole business.

First of all, she goes off and gets married straight out of school. And, well, as I said, if she's happy, I'm happy. I can't say I was overly pleased though- I made that mistake myself, and look where that got me! My daughter's grown up and married and I'm still single. But hey, that's life. I thought Edward's parents would've said something though, especially as Carlisle seems so, well, old-fashioned in his beliefs.

That got me thinking: in the olden days, like _way _back in the olden days, people so uptight about family honour only got married in such a rush in certain circumstances. Like if someone's girlfriend got pregnant. Now I'm more of a sports kinda guy, but Renée used to be a fan of period dramas, and I learned a thing or two from that. To prevent a public scandal marriages were often hastily carried out in order to try and disguise the fact the bride was pregnant.

Okay, now it sounds like I've got no faith in my daughter. But I do. And if she tells me the marriage wasn't a cover-up for a pregnancy then I totally believe her. But then she goes off on her honeymoon. A _really _long honeymoon. I'm not even sure when she came back. It was like one minute she's my little girl and the next she's not even bothering to tell me if she's even in the country.

Well that's married life I suppose, I don't know what I was expecting, but I still thought she'd stay in touch. If not with me then at least with Renée; I always got the feeling she was closer to her mother than to me. But that was alright, I was fine with that, at least I got to see her. If there was one thing I was thankful to Edward for it was keeping Bella in Forks, with me. Even then I didn't see that much of her.

And then… there was the kid. It wasn't just the kid which made me think, it was so much more. Now, I don't like thinking too hard about these kinds of things, especially anything borderlining weird. For one thing Bella was living _in secret_ with the Cullens, when it'd seemed to me like she'd vanished off the face of the Earth, and for another she was… different.

I'd sound like a bad father if I said she now looks beautiful. Bella's always been beautiful; she luckily got most of her genes from Renée. But now she was unreal, she was past beautiful, she was almost alien. For some reason, she looked just like one of the Cullens. I know, they're all adopted, they're not actually related, but they all share a certain look. There're all pale, and look almost like they've been sculpted. And the kid looks just like them.

I'm not a superstitious man. I don't believe in ghosts or werewolves or vampires or zombies; something you can't easily shoot. You can't shoot superstition, no matter how much you want to. So no matter how much I wanted to wonder at what my daughter had become, if she had become anything at all, I pushed those thoughts out of my mind: my daughter was still here, still near.

She's looking after this kid now, with Edward. Some relative of his I'm told, but like everything else that's happened recently I'm not sure what to make of that. The thing is, she looks just like Bella- she could practically be her daughter. Which can't be possible; even if Bella _was _pregnant when she was married, there would be no way she could have a kid that old. It's just another one of those things I guess.

As I said, I try not to think too much of it. I deal with what I can see, what I know, and stick to that. At least Bella's alive (or so it seems to me), she's well, and she's happy. I've just got to move on and accept that she's all grown up. I guess that's the hardest thing of being a parent: as soon as your child has grown up and gone you wish you'd done things differently, or had more time. But it's better this way.

I've always been better at being a cop than a parent.


End file.
